Blog

Twitter seems to be having a big impact on the tech industry as just like the Elon Musk-owned company, Reddit now wants to start charging developers for its API access. The details of the API pricing suggests developers might have to pay millions, $20 million to be precise, every year. Reddit is going to start charging the said from June 19 onwards, which the platform had already informed.

Developers were clearly not pleased about this update, as they realise that without developers the platform certainly can’t grow. The pricing for Reddit API was shared by Christian Selig who is an Apollo developer who was informed by these details by the company itself.

Sharing the details in this post, Selig claims that Reddit will charge $12,000 (Rs 9.87 lakh approx) for every 50 million requests. He pointed out that Apollo made 7 billion requests which comes to around a cost of $20 million for the developer every year.

Developers generally get the raw deal with subscription and if they are forced to pay such a high fee just to access the APIs then platforms like Reddit will find it hard to operate and also convince new developers to sign up with the company. Selig’s post was understandably met with a lot of criticism for Reddit, some of them stating that Reddit should be paying him instead for all the free labour the developers have done over the years.

Twitter pulled through a similar stunt recently, making businesses and developers pay to access its APIs and with Reddit following suit, it is setting a bad precedent which could mean more platforms start charging developers who access their APIs to run the service.